Collector donates 100 vintage radios

TOWN OF MENASHA - When Clyde Stephenson retired 25 years ago, he was looking for something to do with his time.

"I started picking up radios here and there and fixing them up just as a hobby," said Stephenson, who was a radio operator for the U.S. Navy in World War II in Pearl Harbor.

Now 350 radios later, he donated about 100 of them to the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley. The school will use them to start a vintage radio exhibit. The radios date back to as early as the 1920s.

"When (UW-Fox Valley) here built this art building, I thought that'd be a good home for the rest of them,” he said.

His basement was once filled with the antique radios. When he told his wife he was donating them?

“That was the happiest day of her life when I told her I was getting rid of them."

Clyde will turn 90 next year. He was born in 1920. Coincidentally, that's the same year of the first radio newscast. He says when he was a kid he used to have two car batteries that he would switch out to run the radio and then recharge it with the family Model T.

"You didn't waste it, you didn't leave it on. You turn it on for the program and then turned it off. Not like today you walk away and leave it on all day."

After the exhibit, he said he hopes the school can use the radios to teach engineers. Some historians are interested in his collection as well.